Daniel Lyons just wrote a post called Time to hang up the Pajamas that discusses how he has decided to retire from blogging. Daniel is the guy who created the anonymous “Fake Steve Jobs” blog who seemed to post comments on multiple blogs and who was later outed by a NYT reporter, Brad Stone. Lyons’ blog, at its peak was getting 1.5M visitors a month, but was only able to turn that into $1040 of Adwords revenue. I am sure that he could have monetized the site much better, but I believe he is missing the point.
Blogging is not necessarily about making ad revenues. It is about making a name for yourself, your company, and/or products. I, for one, did not build this blog to generate any ad dollars. It is to create awareness of myself and the companies/products that I have. I have a couple of different websites that I run and more are on the way. This is a vehicle for people(and maybe the Press) to find out more about them. Secondly, I would also like more people to know about myself. Bloggers connect with other bloggers online and this turns your blog into a networking vehicle.
You would think that Daniel Lyons would know the benefit of this. I went to his site and he was able to get a book deal on his “Fake Steve Jobs” experience. In addition, I had never heard of Daniel until he started his blog. As a writer, isn’t it important that your name is known?
Xconomy reported on January 30th that Payscale has received $2M in funding. They provide salary/compensation data to job seekers as well as employers. Although their site has been around since 2002, I have never heard of them. Compete and Quantcast are both showing they get around 1M unique visitors a month. I have a feeling I will test out their services the next time we hire someone. It is a pay service for employers who are trying to find the right salary to offer someone.
As for people evaluating jobs, you can fill out a survey to see what the typical salary is for your position/skillset. I ran a test and was in the range I was expecting. I put in VP of Sales at a Content Management Software company in San Francisco. They have a ton of questions so I am not able to list out every answer I gave, but they were the typical answers that you would find in this position. Anyway, the average salary they returned was a salary of $118,600 with average commission of $70,000. I thought that was about right.
Pingdom is calling that the “twitter effect” has now been created. Pete Cashmore from Mashable posted a tweet about this blog post. The traffic generated from twitter brought the site down. There have been a handful of websites that have caused sites to crash just by being mentioned in their blog posts; Digg, TechCrunch, etc. I assume the twitter effect will outgrow all other previous effects because A) twitter is so much more viral and B) its growth has been quite fast and I expect it will continue, and C) twitter’s target market is not just the tech community.
I noticed today – 02/04 – that CNET did a post on this too. How come they got the Techmeme front page?
We had a Super Bowl party yesterday. By far, the most popular commercial was the eTrade Babies ad. To be fair, I missed a lot of the other ones, but I just saw the top rated ones on MSN. I still think the eTrade ads were the the best though. What do you think?
eTrade also has all of the ads they have used here. My favorite is the outtakes version.
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Daniel Lyons just wrote a post called Time to hang up the Pajamas that discusses how he has decided to retire from blogging. Daniel is the guy who created the anonymous “Fake Steve Jobs” blog who seemed to post comments on multiple blogs and who was later outed by a NYT reporter, Brad Stone. Lyons’ blog, at its peak was getting 1.5M visitors a month, but was only able to turn that into $1040 of Adwords revenue. I am sure that he could have monetized the site much better, but I believe he is missing the point. 
